On Going Hungry

George wrote:
<<But communities which maintained a largely "mesolithic" way of life cannot
be demonstrated to have gone hungry. And I find it quite interesting, for
instance, that the Pit-Comb culture only borrowed ceramics as an idea from
its neighbours, and did not convert to either an agricultural or animal
husbandry
economy.>>

The food gathering effectiveness of pre-neolithic groups in Europe might be
measured by what looks like rather small population sizes in comparison with
neolithic populations. (see, e.g., P. Spikins (2000) in C. Conneller, New
Approaches to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, ARC 17:1, 99-121.) Going
hungry may simply be a matter of how many mouths there are to feed versus the
seasonal wild food sources that are available.

Zvebelil has a model for mesolithic/neolithic interaction in the book we
talked about earlier that suggests that food-gathering societies were
transformed by neolithic contact well before conversion. "True" mesolithic
cultures appear to be quite a bit less economically advanced than food
gatherers who have economic contact with domesticators.

Late Comb Ware, of course, does show eventual conversion - e.g., at KASEKÜLA
in Estonia. But at that point these communities already had some economic
and technological parity (e.g, mention of the appearance of Danubian-style
fishing equipment) with neolithic communities. What may be important here is
that the extremely late conversion of otherwise economic developing Comb Ware
communities to full domestication and food production might explain why those
northern communities did not end up adopting an IE language.

(I'm interested in the theory mentioned somewhere on the web that Comb ware
itself developed as packaging for a lucrative export trade in exclusively
northern resources like seal fat!)

Steve